Just Get Out of Your Way!
The people I do tarot card readings for can generally be divided into 2 groups: group 1 wants me to tell them their future, group 2 wants to know what to do about something. They all have questions but the first group is not empowered in their present moment and just wants to hear good things about what is coming along, while the second group feels very empowered in the moment and wants to solve a problem. In the end all people must fall into the second group if they want a future that is different than the life they are presently living. To create a future that is different from the way life looks right here, right now we have to DO something different. We have to create a change.
As anyone who has had a reading by me knows I don’t do readings to tell you your future. I do them…and the only reason I do them, is to help people identify what their strengths and weaknesses are, what their possibilities and challenges are, and mostly to identify their true obstacles. I use the tarot to help people get out of their own way.
About 15 years ago I had a reading from a very gifted psychic who told me that I would do just fine if I could only learn how to stay out of my way. I had been starting to suspect that I was sabotaging myself on a regular basis but I just couldn’t find my way through the madness and I was very stubbornly trying to figure it out all by my self, which really just complicated things off the scale. I decided I needed a new best friend…don’t get me wrong I loved my best friend but she loved me too and there was a mutual non verbal no hurting each other policy in place. I needed to hear some brutal truth now and again. So I bought a deck of tarot cards. I learned to read to myself in the third person so I could be really tough on myself and wouldn’t take it personally ( hey whatever works!) and it worked. I got really good at identifying when I was getting in my way. I even got good at listening and doing what needed doing. Life got better – much, much better.
Most people don’t know when they are standing in their own way. They hate looking at the things they don’t like to see, and so they don’t… and they hate knowing what they don’t want to know and so they don’t! But I have come to realize that when someone is there to support you and tells you that what you are seeing is real, or what you ‘know’ intuitively is true, people can face the most difficult of truths. Once we can face something we are able to create change. And that ‘s why I do what I do. I am very willing to not always be the bearer of good and happy news, I am willing to say the low, down and dirty things. I don’t always like it but I will help you see what is real in your life. I have found that people have amazing resources of strength when they are face to face with what is real, it’s the illusions that we build that are difficult to stand up to. When dealing with illusion we literally feel disoriented, confused and usually immobilized.
Other than showing us the truth of a situation, the tarot will reveal another really key thing to solving our problems; it shows what is most relevant to deal with. So often we tend to focus on the wrong things, blow them out of proportion and then get very busy trying to solve them. But in making mountains out of mole hills we tend to lose our direction and just stay unhappily preoccupied. As we spend our time ineffectively chasing our tails, grumbling about how hard it is to get anywhere, we dig ourselves in deeper and deeper until one day we realize that we are totally exhausted and mired in the muck up to our necks. We also come to bitterly realize that the problem hasn’t changed. The tarot helps us identify what the real issue is and what the most important thing we can do to get through it. Like it or not.
The other thing I like about using the tarot to understand my problems is that it never overrides my choice. I always get to choose if I want to listen, I never have to fear being judged, I never have to do anything I don’t want to do. It’s only a touchstone, a way to check in with myself. If I decide today to do nothing about something I’ve learned, the message will still be there tomorrow when I am perhaps more able to get out of my way.
Andrea Thiel Connell 